Guess who has two thumbs and forgot to hit publish yesterday? This guy.
Clarkhat from Popehat has moved on to posting on a new site, with this post marking his first forray at 451. It discusses True Believers in the Constitution superficially but is really talking about a way to think about how the United States government became the system it is. A good read if you want to stick it to those constitutionalists or if you are a constitutionalist and want to improve your arguments IN A TRIAL BY FIRE.
Dyson Dodecahedron’s Totally Not a DnD Fiasco
Dyson’s Dodecahedron posted his table for motivations, backgrounds, and relationships. Even if some of it is a little specific to his gameworld, I like the fundamental idea behind having random generators for the skeletons of NPC’s (and even players if they are having creative trouble). They give me a springboard to launch from, often getting me to a more interesting place than if I tried to create it all from scratch.
80,000 Hours: The importance of a personal runway
As a big nerd, I actually like budgeting and excel spreadsheets, but this post at 80,000 Hours lays out the foundational argument for having a healthy short term savings as a way to open up your future. I also like things that confirm my own biases when it comes to financial preferences.
MoreLibertyNow: All My People Are Dead
If you want to read a story about those horrible ecologists wanting to exterminate humans to save the planet or if you just want a dystopian future novel painted from another direction, by George Donelly, give Human Free a try.
FiveThirtyEight: How to Destroy Half the Planet for a Mere 5% GDP
My response to this article would be that if he gets to assume the worst possible case for ‘only 5% gdp lost globally’ then I also get to assume worst case of the costs to prevent that loss (assuming the suggested protocols for slowing/stopping CO2 are even able to stop or slow the warming). Assuming we stopped CO2 emissions today (costing the world incredible amounts of money and starving many people for the drop in crop production at a minimum), there would still be some warming, right? You can’t count on government stopping all future GDP % lost as a point in favor of government policy, when it would actually reduce the loss by some amount less than the 5% projected. That would be a variation of the Nirvana fallacy, right? How much of our GDP growth are we willing to give up in the next 100 years to stop a 5% GDP loss by the 100 year mark? If you get to count lost GDP as dead people, don’t we get to count lost GDP growth as dead people too?
My solution to global warming? Have the government stop denying property rights of people whose land, lives, livelihoods, and communities are polluted by protecting the polluters from culpability. The EPA looks like a grand idea on paper but it only exists as a stopgap band-aid to staunch the bleeding caused by denying people the ability to sue polluters for damages (which used to stop polluters up until the industrial revolution when government started to side with big business to increase their tax intake).
AnarchyDice 